Naked Ambition

This feature appears in the June ’16 issue of NRA America’s 1st Freedom, one of the official journals of the National Rifle Association.

Is Hillary Clinton so afraid of possibly losing the Democratic nomination to Bernie Sanders that she has to blame Vermont—a state that is by any measure among the safest in the country—for New York City’s murder rate?

Illustration by T.S. Jessell

It’s clear why Vermont frightens Hillary. Not only is Sanders, who has beaten her in a lot of races lately, from Vermont, but the state is also proof that freedom works. Vermont is the original state to have “permitless” carry, meaning a resident doesn’t need a state-issued permit to carry a concealed handgun.

In an early May attack on Sanders, Clinton manufactured a statistic to lure voters into believing that most of New York’s crime guns come from Vermont. Clinton told about 200 New Yorkers at a campaign event, “Most of the guns that are used in crimes and violence and killings in New York come from out of state. The state that has the highest per-capita number of those guns that end up committing crime in New York come from Vermont.”

This is an outrageous stretch. In truth, TheWashington Post found that only 1 percent of traceable N.Y. crime guns came from Vermont in 2014. However, by adding “per capita,” Clinton divides 55 guns by Vermont’s tiny population to make up a meaningless statistic that virtually no law enforcement agency or media outlet would dare use.

The Post looked at the validity of Clinton’s claim and awarded her three Pinocchios for her strangled stat, which means it has “significant factual error and/or obvious contradictions” and “gets into the realm of ‘mostly false.’”